This AI can help you learn music

A man playing guitar. — (Image credit: igor_kell/iStock)

Each week, we spotlight a cool innovation recommended by some of the industry's top tech writers. This week's pick is a musical artificial intelligence project.

Many amateur and professional musicians spend hours studying YouTube videos of favorite songs so they can learn how to play along, said Mariella Moon at Engadget. A new AI project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory could make that process far easier. PixelPlayer "can recognize instruments in a video, identify specific ones at pixel level, and isolate the sounds they produce."

The AI can take a clip of a guitar and trumpet playing a blues number, for example, and let you increase the volume of the guitar by muting the horn. PixelPlayer recognizes 20 different instruments but struggles with some subtle differences, such as those between an alto sax and a tenor. With further development, though, the AI could become a powerful audio-editing tool, "giving engineers a way to improve or restore the quality of old concert footage."

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